Mission update, take 2

We are a primary mission for tomorrow, Friday, 1 Feb. We'll see what happens. I have made my peace with staying here until 11 Feb, when the CSBF guys call it quits and the ballooning season officially ends, so I am not particularly strssed about this opportunity.

Here is an update on the other two payloads, ATIC and BESS. ATIC came down about 170 miles from South Pole Stations, while BESS came down miles from anywhere, near the top middle of the continent (in its usually displayed orientation). To be more specific, it is about 250 miles from Patriot Hills and 170 miles from AGO-2, both of which are uninhabited camps at this time. You can see ATIC's location in the map above. ATIC was launched at McMurdo, followed the yellow path counterclockwise for the first revolution and the red path for the partial second revolution, until termination at the end after 19.5 days. BESS is shown similarly to the right, and was terminated after 30.5 days. CREAM is shown at the bottom. It was up for 29 days.

Currently the plan is to fully recover ATIC out of the South Pole Station with a Twin Otter. Two colleagues from that experiment are currently positioned at Pole, and are waiting for weather to cooperate there. BESS will not get a recovery mission this year. The plan is to send in two mountaineers on a plane to get the CSBF required equipment and the BESS data (16 terrabytes!!). No scientist will get near the instrument this season. Sometime next summer (eg December) a campaign will be mounted to retrieve the whole instrument.